All of which suggests the extent to which the 2016 campaign is, in the absence of other storylines, all about Hillary. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the vast right-wing conspiracy: The question of how to actually defeat her is proving to be a surprisingly difficult one to answer. Republican activists haven’t come up with a coherent line of attack that will exploit Clinton’s vulnerabilities, a unified field theory of why she can’t be allowed in the Oval Office. “Everybody’s looking for a silver bullet, but in the absence of that we’re finding a lot of lead,” is how Michael Goldfarb, a GOP strategist who runs the WashingtonFree Beacon, described the dilemma of the booming anti-Clinton industry.

Our interviews yielded almost as many lines of potential attack as conversations: There’s her age (she’ll turn 69 just before election day 2016), her health, her loyalty to a diminished Obama, Benghazi, Bill, the vast sums collected by the family’s charitable foundation, the Islamic State and the mess in the Middle East, Obamacare/Hillarycare, unanswered questions about old Arkansas and White House scandals, her perceived habit of stretching the truth, her enormous personal wealth—and how she got it.

Framing an effective anti-Hillary campaign is, in many ways, as complex a challenge as Clinton faces in establishing a rationale for her candidacy. For starters, the sheer volume of information on Clinton serves as a kind of political vaccine (of limited effectiveness, to be sure) against future attacks. So much is already known about Clinton, or presumed to be known, that even genuinely new revelations—like adoring, 1970s-vintage Clinton letters to Saul Alinsky, the leftist father of modern community organizing—or an audiotape unearthed by the Free Beacon of mid-1970s Clinton chuckling about the guilt of a rape suspect she defended—haven’t had a major impact, at least not yet. (“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” she says on the tape, laughing.)

It’s easy to dismiss, as many Democrats do, these early probing attacks as old news. But the drip-drip of rumor and punditry is turning into a steadier flow of potentially damaging revelations. And GOP operatives tell us they are rooting around for silver bullets in all the expected places, from the Benghazi killings to her lucrative speaking engagements and the family’s complex financial dealings. (The Republicans we interviewed said they weren’t looking into Bill Clinton’s personal behavior, but several Democrats we spoke with expressed fear that any new revelation about the former president whose sexual dalliance with a White House intern led to his impeachment would, in the words of one operative who played a prominent role on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, “disrupt everything.”)

But the far less sexy effort to construct durable anti-Clinton narratives almost certainly will pose a greater threat to her ambitions. “The silver-bullet strategy is totally a unicorn,” says Mary Matalin, a veteran Republican strategist who worked for Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and Dick Cheney. Instead, she argues, Republicans need to focus on “HRC’s many vulnerabilities,” which Matalin cheerfully lists: “First, the ‘soggy fries’ phenomenon—she’s been under the heat lamp too long … Obama fatigue … her own record [and] Obama’s foreign policy … her lame campaigning, and I say that lovingly, because being a bad candidate doesn’t make you a loser, just a losing candidate.”

Tim Miller, executive director of America Rising, a GOP-allied super PAC that has increasingly trained its sights on Clinton, told us the oppo wars are all about finding the killer facts that will actually work to sway voters against Clinton. That might be new information, or old information framed in new ways. “Everyone feels like they know her, so we have to give them information they hadn’t heard about to break through,” he says. “For younger voters, some of that ‘new information’ could be ’90s scandals and other aspects of their record they didn’t know about, making that material relevant, if not central, to the case against her.”

Clinton was insulated from these attacks when she jetted around the globe as Obama’s secretary of state, but in the past 18 months, as she has traveled the country and hawked a memoir that was clearly intended to positively define her post-2008 narrative, talking openly about running and stumping for candidates, her stratospheric popularity, which approached 70 percent at Foggy Bottom in 2009, has slumped. A Wall Street Journalpoll in early September found that Clinton’s overall approval rating had sunk to 43 percent, with 41 percent disapproving, putting her back to roughly the same level as when she started her last presidential campaign, in early 2007.

That might be related to Obama’s own slumping poll numbers. In fact, the attack against Clinton that has emerged the earliest is just that: her obvious ties to the president and her tortured attempts to create daylight between herself and her former boss. “There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. She will continue foursquare … and put forward Barack Obama’s policy in a third and fourth term,” is how Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a 2012 also-ran positioning herself as the Anti-Hillary, put it to Politico in early October.

Democrats, especially those who watched her lurch from crisis to crisis in the 2008 race, worry that it’s not the attacks but her tendency to diverge from her own message and strategic imperatives that could prove her undoing—one of the points Plouffe gently delivered during last month’s meeting in the Georgian serenity of Whitehaven.

“You can get in her head,” a former Obama staffer who worked on opposition research against Clinton in 2008 told us.

16 for 16

Top pols pick the words that will define the next race.

Open In New Window

Joel Holland

It’s like psy-ops, one Republican Clinton specialist says: “She’s so easily rattled and taken off her game.”

***

In mid-2007, two teams of opposition researchers converged on Hillary Clinton from opposite partisan directions and wound up meeting on a strikingly similar anti-Clinton talking point.

“SEN. CLINTON CAN’T BE TRUSTED,” read the title on the first page of a 66-page opposition research manual churned out in early 2007 by a small team housed in the white-façaded Capitol Hill headquarters of the Republican National Committee.

The document—a reference book for the GOP’s surrogates and primary candidates—is a scattershot collection of nasty clips, derogatory book excerpts and unflattering statistics that painted a devastating, if disputable, portrait of a flim-flam woman, with references to Clinton’s role in the Whitewater scandal, the secrecy of her White House health reform efforts and her souring on the Iraq War and post-Sept. 11 harsh interrogation techniques. Reading it now, the document at first seems dated, a poison-filled time capsule (the first section: “Sen. Clinton’s Broken Promise on Jobs for Upstate New York”). But it’s revealing too, a preface to the book being written now and a concise demonstration of how a well-fed political organization can weave seemingly disparate facts into a coherent narrative. This is the stuff of modern political campaigns, and not just those with a Clinton on the ballot.